I LOVE TRAINING OUR TRAINERS

I got to do one of my favorite things today; I got to train five of our staff members through their workouts (all at our Minneapolis location: Kevin, Karin, Jake, Brent, and Braunson). Here are a few insights from the personal workouts of our personal trainers that may influence or reinforce your own exercise habits (I even had all of our trainers weigh in on the frequency of their cardio and strength to make sure I wasn’t making assumptions):

They all train with a trainer. Across the rest of the industry, rarely will you see a personal trainer getting trained by another personal trainer. This baffles me. At DS, we always train with a trainer because we know that the scientific literature is overwhelmingly clear; regardless of your goals, direct supervision stimulates better results. My next workout will be with Alex in Chanhassen on Sunday.

They strength train on average, 1.8 times per week. Most are religious about 2 strength workouts per week while a few prefer to train once every 4-5 days. Additionally, a few of them will cut to 1 strength workout per week if they are training for a marathon, ultramarathon, or Ironman (for example, David K. and Andy in Plymouth).

About half of them do absolutely no cardio. This is motivated by the research that (1) cardio has a negligible impact on fat loss and (2) research indicates that strength training provides significant cardiovascular benefit (in fact, strength training may be better cardio than “cardio.” [ARTICLE]

About half of them perform cardio 2-5 times per week. Running (sprint intervals as well as distance running) and spinning are the most popular forms of cardio. Perhaps David K., Karin A., Rick, and myself are the most committed to cardio.

They do very little additional exercise. A couple drop into a yoga class once per week and a few are active in soccer or volleyball leagues (this is recreation more so than exercise).

There is no correlation between our staff who do cardio (or the amount of cardio) and their body composition. Many of our leanest trainers NEVER do cardio (and as stated above, this makes sense as cardio doesn’t appear to have an impact on fat loss).

They enjoy “variety” workouts but the bulk of the time, they record every detail of their workout.

The specific exercise they are most likely to skip in a workout is abs.

They rarely skip lower back.

They have great form AND train with a high level of intensity. I trained Kevin and Karin today, two very veteran trainers, and it would be nearly impossible to find an example of people who train with better form and intensity.

They have variation in the total number of exercises. Some of the workouts I administered today were only 5 exercises while others were 20 exercises.

They are obsessive about post-exercise protein consumption.

They, almost universally, hate doing 20 or more reps on leg press (they are humans after all).